If you succeeded in something important to you, what was it? And how did you succeed?

Responses

My main goal for many years was to provide for my family, even after I am gone.I have been successful in doing so. If I die today my wife will be taken care of financially for many years. How did I do this? I worked and planned for 45 years.

I have a wonderful husband and a continuing position in a successful firm that has come to pay me lots more than I ever imagined I would be worth. The latter by being conscientious and taking it very seriously and applying myself and following instructions and getting on with people. The former I think by just being myself and hopeful and continuing to reach out for love.

Was a novelty idea.. after I got out of the Navy I realized all that time floating around on the Atlantic Ocean I never got the idea to put a note in a bottle and toss it overboard to see where it might end up like on some shoreline where someone might find it. So anyway in Winnipeg I spread the idea to any friends, relatives et al to write on a piece of paper a note which I would tuck into a bottle and deposit it into the ocean when I travel to visit the east coast where I had lived for ten years. I hitched a ride with a couple of fishermen and launched the bottles a few miles off Cape Spear Newfoundland into the Labrador current which is picked up by the Gulf Stream current then heads directly toward the British Isles then heads southward. In about six months the first bottle was found on the shores of Ireland by a retired guy strolling the beaches. Eight more bottles were found -3 in the British Isles, 2 in France and 2 in Spain. Mission accomplished! More were likely found but I moved away from Winnipeg about a year later.

I entered a piano concerto competition at the collegiate level. For many reasons, I was truly the underdog.I was playing a concerto by my favorite composer for piano, Robert Muczynski. His music resonates within my soul like no other composer has ever been able to do. Muczynski and I even has a written correspondence going on for several years prior to, and during, the months-long competition, after I first had written to him to tell him how much I admired his works years earlier.

I ended up winning the competition and got to play a movement of the concerto with a live orchestra.